My interest in making art came from a love for movies and pop music, not from any relationship to what’s stored in museums. One of my most painful childhood memories, in fact, was being taken to the Louvre at age twelve. Similarly torturous were outings to the symphony; and then there was the time my father took me to a Minnesota Vikings football game . . . oh, but I guess that’s because I’m gay.

Not one to lose myself in the moment, it seemed unlikely I’d ever become a rock star. My interests, anyway, were in dissection and commentary. I felt that the world was glutted with images and that anything you could imagine must already exist. I focused on rearranging and altering what was already there. My early works like Maxell, 1990, or Countdown, 1995, were single-channel videos, so most of those images came from TV. It wasn’t initially clear to me that I was making art at all, pop or otherwise.

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